2007-2008 HERI Faculty Survey

In 2007-2008, UND participated in the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) Faculty Survey conducted through the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at the University of California at Los Angeles. The survey primarily focuses on full-time faculty engaged in undergraduate teaching. It provides information on faculty characteristics, teaching and other activities, workload, job satisfaction and sources of stress. It also asks faculty about their perceptions of the institution and the goals they have for themselves and for undergraduate students. This reports highlights findings from full-time undergraduate (FTUG) faculty responses and compares them to FTUG faculty from other public university respondents.

Overall, faculty express satisfaction with their career choice at UND. When asked if they were to begin their careers again, 86% of full-time undergraduate (FTUG) faculty would again choose to be a college professor, and 72% would again come to UND. When asked about overall job satisfaction, 73% report being satisfied or very satisfied. Some additional findings include:

• FTUG faculty at UND are in general more teaching-focused than research-oriented. They usually spend more time each week teaching or preparing for teaching than on any other activity listed on the survey. They tend to teach more courses than their national counterparts.

• When compared to the 2002 survey, more faculty report using the Internet in their teaching, either by exclusively teaching via the Internet or collecting assignments.

• Fewer faculty report working with undergraduates on research in 2008 than in 2002 (49% compared to 66%), however faculty report more time being spent on research and scholarly writing overall (8.3 hours per week in 2008 compared to 6.6 in 2002).

• In terms of teaching and evaluation methods, a wide range of techniques have been used by faculty and four methods listed on the survey (class discussions, cooperative learning/small groups, using real-life problems, and competency-based grading) have been used by more than 50% of UND FTUG faculty.

• When evaluating UND's diversity, over half the faculty feel diversity should be more strongly reflected in the curriculum (60%) and 72% feel enhancing student knowledge and appreciation for other groups is an important undergraduate goal, yet just one-fifth (23%) of faculty use readings on racial and ethnic issues and readings on women and gender issues (19%) as teaching methods in most of their courses. Nearly one-third (31%) feel there is a lot of racial conflict here, but this is lower than the 54% who felt this way in the 2002 survey.

• FTUG faculty experience a considerable amount of stress, with over three-quarters of faculty reporting stress from time pressures, lack of personal time, institutional procedures, and managing household responsibilities.